Off Center

After talking to Ambrose in the afternoon, Brennan returns to his guest chambers, and outfits himself in the more traditional garb of Uxmal and its ruling class. Complete with the feathers. Tayanna always went for that sort of thing.

Suitably garbed, he works his way toward wherever she is. On finding her, if she is attended by anyone, Brennan's bearing and glance should convince them they are not required here.

Tayanna's day chamber overlooks the courtyard of the temple complex. She is attended by a number of her priestesses, who rise and bow and depart without obvious signals from Tayanna.

The high priestess herself rises and comes to embrace her son. "You look ... very handsome," she says, veering away from the dangerous words. "Come, sit by me, and let us talk."

Brennan either ignores or fails to notice the shift away from a delicate subject, and sits across from his mother after the embrace, a little less awkward than the previous night's. His attempt not to sprawl in his customary fashion is aided-- slightly-- by the garb he wears. But he will adapt.

It's difficult to work up a proper pre-amble to cover a five hundred year absence.

"How did he take it?"

Tayanna doesn't pretend she doesn't know what Brennan is talking about. "Badly. The skies raged, and the lightning struck his foes. There was darkness over the land. The gods wept. Then, after a time, he changed, and all was better. He said he no longer needed you to achieve his desires, and he departed Uxmal for a time. When he returned, he threw himself into his work again, and it was if he had forgotten."

"That can't have been pleasant," Brennan acknowledges, already having imagined the scene Tayanna describes many times in the past. "However, my departure was necessary to achieve my desires. Our family squabbles have always had a tendency to catch others squarely in the middle."

Tayanna bows her head in acknowledgement of this truth. "Later, he spoke of you on rare occasions, and wished you would return to Uxmal to help him in his work," she offers.

Brennan almost smiles in response. "I doubt the glyphs exist that could be strung together that would have brought me back before I was ready. It's just as well for everyone that Brand didn't make a habit of trying to convince me. I would only have spent decades, or even centuries, just wondering when he was going to change again." He centers the syntax on the addendum: "Unwise," as he slips into deeper comfort with the Uxmali he learned in his youth, which was archaic even then.

Tayanna may be the only person left alive who speaks it as he does, unlike the vernacular he's been hearing from others. Even Ambrose.

He shifts around his feathered garb, and continues, "Which brings up another Family trait-- stubbornness. Willfulness."

"It is," Tayanna agrees, "a trait I have observed in your father's line. Even his sister is prey to it." Fiona's name is the unspoken center of the two sentences, and a bitter smile accompanies her unnamed name.

"She sends her warmest regards," Brennan says smoothely, "as does Grandmother, of course. I'm sure she will be touched to know that you have thought of her after all these years.

"I understand my brother has introduced you to more of our family."

"The water goddess, yes. She was injured when Ambrose brought her here. We tended her and now she is gone," Tayanna said. "She told us something of the last battle. She could not say whether your father succeeded in his aims or not."

"Nor can I, but it's safe to say that he achieved at least some of them." Heroically, Brennan does not spit or otherwise betray what he really thinks of that.

"Did he tell you how he came to bring her here?"

"Not in detail. He said that he had gained her in parley with your father's allies, and that she was of Amber. I know he had gone to do something in Amber that he thought was risky, and that he hoped would enable him to put an end to the threat of Chantico."

Tayanna draws in a breath. "Has he done something foolish?"

"Ambrose gambled," Brennan replies, and after a moment he stands to pace. He's decided many of the words before. Now he's deciding which ones to say.

"Rather audaciously, at that. And while I am not without pride in my brother for the attempt, it went sour; there were circumstances he could not have foreseen, and Brand's allies are neither mine nor Ambrose's." For all the complexity in that archaic web of words, pride is the anchor.

"I think much of his actions since that one bad moment have been trying to recover, and catch his balance so he can try again. Perhaps without the element of gamble, this time," he says. Full Uxmali irony unveiled would give even Julian a run for his money.

"I see," Tayanna replies. "And this has what to do with the water goddess?" She seems suddenly quite concerned about that point.

Brennan turns from his pace to Tayanna a carefully incurious look before continuing.

"Brand's putative allies took the opportunity to declare war on the Family, during which Ambrose, by his presence, was made into an accomplice, and certain crimes were committed against Amber and Family, including the kidnapping of Fiona's daughter."

He pauses.

"Is she really introducing herself as Water Goddess?"

"No," says Tayanna, sounding a touch confused. "But it is what she is. It shines from her like a star. Do you not see it?"

"She is what she is."

"And what is her interest in your brother?" Tayanna asks sharply.

"You mean aside from a member, however unwitting, of the group that kidnapped her, and then her liberator?" he asks.

"You know what I mean," Tayanna says, a bit crossly.

Brennan smiles faintly. "I haven't had the luxury to pry in that direction. Yet. And I don't expect either of them-- Ambrose in particular-- will take kindly to it. Does it trouble you?"

"You are concerned that your father's sister will be wroth with him. Is it unreasonable that I share your concern, even if it is from a somewhat different direction?" The twin sentences spiral out from the words of concern.

Brennan nods, but then his eyes narrow, as does his question: "Are you concerned that my cousin will manipulate him? Or that my aunt will manipulate him through her?"

"Fiona has never cared for me." In another woman, the gesture might be a nervous tic of touching her hair, but the slight movement of Tayanna's hand to adjust her headdress is graceful.

"I prefer that she have a better opinion of Ambrose."

"So do I, but there is only so much I can do to present Ambrose to the Family. We'll barter words and gossip for centuries, but it's always actions and commitments that speak loudest." Family competes with actions for the anchor of the sentence.

"I have never understood Fiona's feelings for you."

"Jealousy." Tayanna lets the word stand alone, monumental.

The rise of Brennan's eyebrow is its own interrogative glyph.

"Some women think no other is good enough for their son. Others think no woman is good enough for their brother." Tayanna shrugs. "I am a priestess, not a goddess. And I had a place in his affections."

"And so you worry that Fiona will transfer those feelings to her daughter, now that her brother is dead." He nods his head. "I would think Fiona to be more fair than that, but we are none of us perfect."

He lightens the mood: "Except Bleys. I'm sure he told you." He continues: "I will watch. I can promise nothing more for now."

"It is a brother's place," she says, sounding satisfied. She reaches out and takes Brennan's hand and squeezes it.

He puts his other hand over hers, and holds it.

"He's not going to thank me for that. Nor will my cousin," he mutters, but he doesn't pursue that issue, for the moment.

"It is also a son's duty," he says, "to learn of his family. Both sides. But the inclination toward history came to me only after I left."

"What would you know?" Tayanna asks. She leans forward slightly in her seat, and adds her other hand the clasp, so that she holds Brennan's hand as much as he holds hers.

Brennan laughs, almost Bleyslike. "Everything. And remember, I left as a fourteen year old boy with no interest in history and no knowledge of his mother's lineage other than that, presumably, she also had a set of parents of her won. A fourteen year old boy who never had the sense to wonder if his mother's history extended any farther back than his own birth."

He speaks more quietly, then, "Who grew, a hundred years later, to assume his mother had grown old and passed on."

Tayanna unclasps the freer of her hands and strokes Brennan's cheek. "And one hundred years later, the mother still worried for her son."

Brennan permits this, but almost shrugs in response. "My gamble was luckier than Ambrose's. But that doesn't help me trace my lineage back any farther. I can name more than half a dozen generations back on Brand's side, but no more than you on yours."

"My lineage goes back very far," Tayanna tells him. It is a matter of some pride to her. "The priests of my house are descended from one of the first incarnations of Feathered Serpent. It is one reason I was fit to be a bride of the god your father."

[I think Brennan's theme song just changed to "Sacrificial Lambs"]

[heh]

Brennan names those incarnations that he can recall from his childhood indoctrination in reverse order, waiting either until Tayanna identifies the right one, or his list is exhausted.

She stops him at the earliest incarnation he knows of. The lines of descent she lists include no names or aliases known to Brennan to be

"That's a prouder legacy than I knew, descended of the gods on both sides."

Tayanna smiles again. "It is Feathered Serpent's blood that makes you and your brother so strong, my son. Your father's first wife was not so strong as I am, and the godhead she bore burned her from within, so she died in bearing and her son did not survive."

Brennan had been gearing up to ask another question, but that cut him off completely. "Brand's... first wife. I had an older brother? Please. What were their names?"

"Her name was Citlali. Her son was born dead and never was named."

Brennan bows his head. "A month ago, I thought I was an only child. Now, a younger brother, and an elder, even if he never survived." He carefully stops himself before he mentions a sister. "I should have been more curious as a boy."

Then he remembers what else he was going to ask, and approaches it carefully, spiralling in. "Does the Serpent's lineage also affect our lifespans?" Another thought finds its way out of Brennan's mouth before she can answer the first: "Do my grandparents survive?"

"They passed while you dwelt in exile," Tayanna replies, taking the second question first. "For the other, it is true that the blessings of the gods include long life. As your father's consort, I have lived long and well." She bows her head slightly, and her expression is resigned. "It is unlikely that whoever takes your father's place will want me as his priestess."

He lets that hang in silence while gathering his thoughts.

"The main claimants would appear to be Ambrose and this Chantico creature," he says.

At the second name, Tayanna sits straight again, her back a rigid, angry line. "She must not be permitted to claim your father's mantle. She cares for nothing but power and pride. The rituals will go undone, the sun will burn the land, the corn seed will lie barren in the soil. It must be your brother, Brennan."

"She didn't make a great first impression, either," he responds.

"Your brother is gentle and will not smite her. He can no longer afford to hold his hand back from her." In Brennan's clasp, he can feel his mother's hand moving, as if to ball into a fist.

Brennan is gentle as well, as he prevents his mother from making that fist.

"My brother needs to simplify his field of play," he says, by way of a more general agreement.

"And how would you propose he do so?" Tayanna says, perhaps more sharply than she means.

Brennan lets out a long, tired sigh, but does not immediately answer her question.

"I know exactly what I would do. Exactly how I would do it. Exactly what benefits I would reap. Exactly how I would use them." He shifts, adjusting for another feather in those garments of his.

"What I don't know is how to give all that excellent advice. The last time I gave advice..." he trails off. "It was good advice. I just couldn't get her to take it."

"Ambrose is proud. He does not take advice well," Tayanna allows. Something about Brennan's speech seems to have allayed her ill humor.

She reaches up with her free hand and touches Brennan's nose. "He reminds me of someone else I know who would not listen to his mother."

Brennan does not allow this, turning his head away, even though he knows she means well. Aisling's pointless death is too fresh. "It took me five hundred years," he says. "I came for more than just history lessons."

Tayanna withdraws her hand and closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, she is composed, and her hand has come to rest in her lap. The other hand is slipping out from between Brennan's, although he could stop it if he wished.

He does stop it. He dips his head and says, "I only confirmed her death yesterday."

"I am sorry for your loss."

Having stopped her hand's retreat, he gives it a squeeze. "Thanks. So am I. It was pointless, and preventable, and I'm not eager to learn that lesson again."

"I do not wish you to learn more of the lessons of loss, either, my son." Tayanna tilts her head slightly to one side. "I will speak to Ambrose. I can guarantee nothing, but I have hopes that my words will sway him."

"And I hope he doesn't realize that I went straight from trying to give him advice, to getting his mother to give him advice," he mutters a little too quickly.

"Here, then, is what I would do: Realize that Brand's allies used him. Badly. Realize, above all, that he probably can't sit the fence between them and the Family in their self-proclaimed war, so he should figure out which side he's on and which can offer him more.

"Self-servingly enough, I think the Family can offer him more, and I think he knows it."

Brennan's sentences have taken on a complex, almost crystalline character as he builds his case.

"When I return home, which will be soon, I've agreed to take his requests to the Family. I think his case will be stronger if he offers something other than sorrow for past misdeeds. Support against Brand's allies would be significant.

"When we win, he will not have Brand's allies to worry about. Nor will he need to worry about the Family, if he plays it right. His reward will be considerable, and will certainly aid him against this Chantico creature.

"All he loses is a neutrality in which no one believes."

"When gods war, no man can stand aside," Tayanna says philosophically.

"Even less so the gods themselves."

After Brennan completes his conversation with Tayanna, it must be near the time of the evening meal. He takes that meal in public, most likely with Tayanna and Ambrose, unless they are unavailable. He will press to keep the conversation as light as it possibly can be, not continuing either of the conversations of the day-- after those talks, everyone will need a chance to digest and reflect. Trying to continue them so soon would be fruitless.

He does, however, take the chance to enjoy true Uxmali cuisine again-- especially the blindingly hot ice peppers that most folk used as sparing seasoning, but which he and Clarissa used to enjoy almost as side dishes. He even rediscovers the joys of chocolate as a beverage. The real stuff, with pepper in it.

After dinner, he retires to his chambers, garbs himself more reasonably once again, and brings out his Trumps. He sets three on the table in front of him, then turns them face down. He then turns one face up at a time, concentrating until he makes contact with one, or he makes it all the way through the line without success.

The order is: Fiona, Caine, Bleys.

Fiona answers. "Yes, Brennan? How are you?"

She is sitting on the grass somewhere, on a blanket, looking for all the world as if she has been at a picnic.

Brennan probably looks tired, but he says, "Well enough, Favoured Aunt, and asking private advice." Despite having eaten recently, the picnic tableau looks appealing, with its promise of a less oppressive heat, and an absence of that red moon.

He turns to his left, seeing the bottle someone had so thoughtfully left for him. "I bear Uxmali wine, and behold! It is of a vintage I recall having your favor. If you consent to bring me through for a short talk, do you think the time flows will permit me to return in ten hours?"

He also tells her how long it's been since the other time he tried to contact her, if she sensed that, to aid in the judgement of time flows. Given how well she knows him, and what she knows of Ambrose, it seems unlikely that she would miss Brennan's unspoken concern that his half of the conversation may not be secure in that place.

Fiona did not sense his other contact, as it happens.

When Brennan has finished speaking, she turns her attention to someone else, someone physically present wherever she is. "My nephew Brennan proposes a brief visit. Shall I bring him through?"

On receiving an answer, she extends her hand to Brennan. "Don't neglect the wine, Brennan."

As she is speaking to her off-Trump companion, Brennan frowns slightly for a moment. But he scratches a quick note in case time plays tricks: "Out for some fresh air-- be back soon."

When he steps through the connection, he finds himself on the side of a mountain that he's never seen before. The view is strangely familiar to him, but at the same time disconcertingly wrong. Fiona says to her companion, "I knew I shouldn't have sent the glasses back to Caine."

Her companion replies, "Never mind, Fiona; we'll make do somehow." And he adds to his great-great-great-great-grandson, "Hel-lo, Brennan. It's been a while." He's taller now, much taller, and straight of back, but the bug-eyed countenance is much the same.

It's Dworkin.

Whoever Brennan had been expecting with Fiona, Dworkin wasn't it. He stops and stares for a moment in somewhat pleased surprise, and his mind starts to automatically convolve the conversation he'd wanted to have with Fiona around his presence.

"Dworkin," he says. "I gave Random your message."

Then a suspicion sneaks down his back like ice water. He turns to Fiona, eyes narrowed and trying not to stiffen his back: "Fi... where are we?"

He has the wine. She can take it if she wishes.

She does. "We're at the center--or rather, it's a few minutes' walk that way." She points with the bottle.

"I assume you'll want to go down there and look in a few minutes. But we're not done discussing the news of the day, yet. Random has made a new Pattern."

"She always did like him best," Dworkin grumbles petulantly.

Brennan nods, not in surprise but more in sorrow.

He looks up at Dworkin and says, "He finished, then. Is Amber's Pattern completely beyond repair, then? Is there no way to remake it or the Great Road?"

Dworkin says, "The Great Road? It never was unmade. As for Amber ... there is a way." He looks Brennan up and down. "In time, perhaps you might do it."

Brennan says nothing, but buries that in his heart like a man in mourning buries the new reports that his love wasn't found among the bodies.

"But we need to let things retune themselves to the new scale. Do you like heptatonic scale, Brennan?"

Fiona watches the exchange wordlessly, keeping her feelings, whatever they are, to herself.

"I like anything you can adapt to rhythm and blues," Brennan quips, mostly to give him a moment to think. By now, he knows more than well enough that nothing Dworkin says should be taken lightly.

He jerks his head in the direction Fiona indicated earlier, and says, "The Center. Paris. Rebma. Tir-na Nog'th. Random's new one. I would have thought that a superfluity, but... there are more? There will be more?"

"If you knew how to follow the road, you'd know the answer to that already," Dworkin replies. "And you may not be ready for the answer until you know the road."

"Then I shall learn."

He gestures to Fiona. "Come on, let's walk down. Bring the wine with you." He adds for Brennan's benefit, "She may want it afterwards." If he suspects that Brennan will as well, he leaves that thought unvoiced.

Well, that seems to have effectively closed that conversation, at least for the moment. He throws Fiona an eyebrow as he offers her a hand to help her stand, and follows them to their destination.

The threesome head out down the grassy incline on which Fiona was sitting. The sea is somewhere nearby, from the scent on the air.

There's a path. Brennan remembers it, but it's all wrong. It's about 300 feet, maybe 350. At the end of the path, there's an area of solid, unfractured rock, cupped in the path down. The sea is off to the right.

It occurs to Brennan that this is a view from the side of Kolvir, without the city. But it's not from the castle's height. They're much lower down, and it's like the mountain has been shaved off here--at the level of the pink-gold marbled image towards which Brennan and his relatives are now walking.

Brennan takes the path deep in some thought or other, making his way as much by muscle memory of the path to Pattern he'd visitted before as by conscious thought and guidance. He's obviously not thinking about his naturally long paces as compared to Fiona's obviously shorter ones.

When the similarity of the paths works its way into his consciousness, he slows down, briefly, from his long limbed stride, to look around carefully and fix the details in his mind, both the similarities and the differences.

Dworkin has obviously been tempering his long stride to allow Fiona to keep up. He's a couple of inches taller than Brennan now, and Brennan has about a foot of height on Fiona. The old wizard helps her down the path in her long skirts.

So it is that Brennan comes first to the Pattern.

When Brennan reaches it, he walks right up to the edge of it where the Pattern begins. For a moment it looks as though he's going to walk it without even breaking stride, but he stops right at the edge of it, surveying it carefully, scowling. His back is perfectly straight and his arms are clasped tightly behind his back, looking and considering.

When he hears Fiona and Dworkin coming up along the path behind him, he takes a very quick pair of steps back and to his left, turning his body so that he can see them and the Pattern both. His head snaps around toward them and Fiona can surely see his arms tense for a moment, but his hands stay clasped.

A moment later, he says to them both, "I understood there had been blood damage done. Was Grandfather able to repair this one, but the one under Amber remained damaged? What happened?" Brennan clearly doesn't understand everything that's happened, and that just as clearly bothers him.

His arms drop from behind his back, finding more natural resting places at his side.

Fiona reaches up, sliding the arm that rests on Dworkin's around so that her hand rests on his shoulderblade. With her other hand, she laces her fingers in Dworkin's. She gazes at her old master, the spark in her catlike green eyes dim for once.

"We recreated this one," Dworkin says. "It cost my son his life."

Fiona can tell Brennan later if he managed to let any of the tension out from between his shoulders or not, as he bowed his head in respect, and shared grief.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly, covering a vast multitude of sins. He doesn't bother to explain the path his thoughts had taken. It's not important. "I'm sorry, Dworkin."

Dworkin shakes his head. "It was necessary. He chose to die so that others might live."

Fiona squeezes her old master's arm again, burying her face against his coat. Dworkin pets her hair absently with his free hand. "It will all be all right, Fiona. It's all done now. He understood, and forgave you all." He looks at Brennan rather helplessly, as if hoping the younger man will assist him by changing the subject.

Brennan hesitates a moment, thinking and remembering, then resolves and shakes his head slightly.

"Apologies are for the living. Like funerals." He reaches over to put a comforting hand on Fiona's shoulder-- if she needs more support than Dworkin is giving, and even more than that hand, she's going to have to make some small motion toward him, but she'll have what she needs.

Brennan can feel that Fiona's shoulder is trembling slightly beneath his hand.

"Clarissa mused, the last time we spoke, how different things might have gone, if only," he continues, almost musing himself. "I think she imagined me in the van of a different army." He shrugs. "The particulars don't matter, though-- she's right. I had five hundred years, and if only... things might be different."

Dworkin nods.

"Fiona," he says, and when she doesn't respond, he repeats himself, "Fiona."

The sorceress looks up at her old master. She is not crying.

Dworkin says, "You can't turn back time. Perhaps if we'd done it before this new Pattern was laid, or before the repair here--but then I wouldn't have been able to help you. There's nothing that can be done now.

"Your brother made his choices. Your father made his. You and Bleys made yours, and young Brennan here made his. Brennan is right. Things might be different, if you'd all made different choices. They might be better, but they might be worse. If things had fallen out differently, that lovely daughter of yours who found her way up here might never have been born. And that would be a shame, too."

Fiona nods slowly.

Dworkin reaches out and pats Brennan's shoulder with the hand Fiona isn't clutching. "So we go on from here, don't we?"

Fiona nods slowly, again.